Someone brought up to me that 7-zip could be stopping some users from easily using Special K.
What do you think about using .zip instead so that windows 10 can decompress it without using a 3rd party program?
Unfortunately, no. I need 7-zip because I have support for the format in Special K itself. It is much more advanced than .zip is and allows for streaming compressed assets.
SK can download and install itself, so 7-zip is critical.
Makes sense to me! 7zip is one of the tools i always recommend people install.
On that note, there’s also the option to create a simplistic one-file Special K / SKIF installer that basically only downloads and extracts https://sk-data.special-k.info/SpecialK.7z to the Documents\My Mods folder, and creates start menu shortcut for SKIF.
Basically a separate one-click “installer” for SKIF that the Downloads link on top would point to.
Someone else can write that… I use C++ and that would not be simplistic at all 
That would be such a time consuming process that it’d be faster to just build that into SKIF.exe and ship that instead.
Isn’t 7-zip compatible across multiple systems too although I suppose for SpecialK it uses the Windows .dll files of whatever version is included but it probably isn’t too crucial to maintain them that frequently unless there’s some major issues or security concerns.
Guessing the internal D3D11_47 dll compiler could also be a concern for some Linux and Wine with DXVK or Proton depending on things but it seems one of the key concerns with Windows and DXVK support is due to .dll linking which can be overriden in Linux so that might be a non-issue.
What else is in there the debug helper .dll files to avoid this linkage and problem with thread safety and the packed CEGUI stuff which gets unpacked if activated along with let’s see Steam API stuff and Tobii SDK files I believe.
CEGUI might be deprecated at some point as I understand it and compression wise I think 7-zip keeps it fairly simple without using some custom compression methods.
…Or I’m reading into it a bit more and this is about the packed download not the .dll packed data in turn. Yeah looks like it’s more about that. 
Though it’s about the same I would think anything capable of handling the open (AFAIK) 7-zip format would do. 
(Unlike RAR or RAR5 or a more closed format there should be plenty of utilities for managing this.)
Yes, it’s cross-platform… no, Special K doesn’t use any kind of DLLs for 7-zip.
7-zip is unbelievably, public domain. Why Microsoft hasn’t integrated it directly into Windows, I have no flipping idea. There’s even less preventing them from doing that than there is with these other formats.
SK contains all the code for 7-zip written in C, and if for some reason SK were ever re-compiled for a different platform, that’s the one part of SK that would require zero work to port.
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Huh what do you know, and yet they stick with some basic Zip format support and that can also handle simple ISO and part CAB I think.
Seems like a solid contended for improvement, data compression like the Windows update stuff for one area where that could come in use then just as a quick thing that comes to mind.
(Although DISM and it’s things here could have some tricks of their own for the CAB format already.)
EDIT: Well not basic, older perhaps although somewhat updated to cover a few things in newer Windows builds besides just .zip on it’s own.
Feels like it’d be a good improvement if that’s the case since it’s public domain.
Yeah, I can probably throw something together someday. I technically already have all of the functionality in SK-Tiny, with the difference being that it relies on a separate 7z DLL file and don’t carry it embedded.
But this one would be an entirely separate and slimmed down app. It’s sole purpose would be to download a file (using .NET calls) to %TEMP% and then extract it to the Documents SK folder, prompting about overwriting existing files in the process if the folder already exists.
Edit: And create a start menu shortcut as well.
I don’t know about %TEMP%… I’ve been around the block long enough to know that anti-virus software doesn’t like it when software you just nabbed off the web stores something there. The stuff that analyzes software behavior will go crazy, especially if it’s not code signed.
I hate anti-virus, BTW
Nah, %TEMP% should be fine if we were to use proper and well known .NET calls without resorting to weird and unexpected behaviors. Simply downloading a file and then extracting it shouldn’t cause many flags to occur.